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Days before she was set to go to trial over $12 worth of ceviche sold on Facebook, Mariza Ruelas struck a deal with the San Joaquin County district attorney.

On Friday, prosecutors in the central California county agreed to drop various misdemeanor criminal charges, including operating a food facility without a permit, if Ruelas did 80 hours of community service within a year. She also agreed to not sell or trade food online unless she has the proper permits.

When Ars asked her how she felt on Friday afternoon, Mariza Ruelas said by phone: "Relieved, you know? It's just like, ugh, finally it's over."

"I feel like I won. There's no misdemeanor. I didn't plea to nothing," she added.

District Attorney Kelly McDaniel did not respond to Ars' request for comment.

"For her as well for me, the big difference is that she doesn’t have to get up there and say: 'I'm guilty of this'—we're keeping her innocent," Ruelas' public defender, Benjamin Hall, told Ars.

"It's a good resolution. Personally, I think even in the misdemeanor world there's so many more serious misdemeanors. For something like this taken to the extent that it was. If they had given her this at the beginning it would have been resolved in no time. The amount of time and resources that was put into this is kind of surprising at the end of the day."

According to the FBI, Stockton, a city of about 300,000 people approximately 80 miles east of San Francisco, has one of the highest rates of violent crime in California. Many local critics felt it was a waste of the county's resources to take such a low-level criminal defendant to trial.

Ruelas' trial had been initially scheduled for December 2, 2016 but was postponed several times until its latest slotted date: January 31, 2017.

For their part, local authorities insisted it was their duty to stave off the potential health risks.

"It would be negligent for our office to ignore it," Supervising Deputy District Attorney Robert Himelblau said during a November 9, 2016 press conference in Stockton. "We did not send anybody out there to go hunt people down. We are not trying to prevent people from cooking or sharing or potlucks or anything like that."

Part-time cook, part-time Uber driver

As Ars reported last year, the case began back in early 2015, when the San Joaquin County Environmental Health Department had received complaints about unlicensed food being sold on a Facebook group called "209 Food Spot." One person even said they got sick as a result. So, the EHD, as a responsible county agency, decided to investigate.

Unlike an unlicensed taco stand or another unlicensed food business that operates on the street and can easily be shut down, getting ahold of 209 Food Spot was trickier. Nearly everyone was cooking and selling from their own homes. The EHD contacted multiple sellers directly, warning them that they did not have adequate permits. But these warnings had little, if any, effect on the Facebook group. The EHD stepped up its game by sending letters to some of the sellers. Those warnings were ignored, too.

By December 2015, Gabe Herrera, a retired Stockton police officer working as an EHD investigator, decided to go after six different women, chosen at random from 209 Food Spot. One of those women was Mariza Ruelas, a 37-year-old single mother of six children. Posing as Robert Paine, Herrera went to Ruelas' house, handed over $12, and walked away with 32oz of ceviche. (He has not responded to Ars’ request for comment.)

Six months later, in June 2016, Ruelas and five other women received a court summons for their arraignment to face state-level misdemeanor criminal charges for operating a food facility without a valid permit and engaging in business without a permit to sell. None of them were amongst those who had received prior warnings from the EHD.

The other five women were offered plea deals of a year of probation, 40 hours of community service, and $250 in fines. They immediately accepted. Ruelas, by contrast, was initially offered three years probation and 80 hours of community service. She was the only one who requested a lawyer and was provided a public defender.

Eventually McDaniel offered Ruelas a "plea in abeyance," a similar arrangement that would require that she plead guilty and do the 80 hours. However her record would be wiped clean after a year. Ruelas refused this deal, staunchly arguing that she had not broken the law.

In recent weeks, Ruelas has become a part-time Uber and Lyft driver to support her six children. Soon, she will also be hosting a birthday party for herself, where she plans on serving ceviche.

In the meantime, the single mother also said she will continue to advocate for the relevant food laws to be revised to accommodate small-scale home food production.

"The more people we get supporting the law change, I'm sure we can make things happen," she said. "We shouldn't have to worry about people going to court or going to jail if we can just make a change."

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar